After so many humiliations: as in Brazil 1988 (the fake Plano Cruzad0 that made disasters, although for politicians’ fault – but NOBODY knew), 20 years later economists have been banned WORLDWIDE from élite clubs, from the Culture where they had not yet entered.

BUT: there’s a compensation. At least in a restricted, less cultivated biznezz and operative area, economists have won an audience they didn’t in Campus.
Read the wsj today:

The New Stars of the Blogosphere

Americans trying to understand the nail-biting financial trauma of the past several months are flocking by the millions to a surprisingly lively source of enlightenment: blogs written by economists.

Such blogs are thriving in this recession, driven by intense interest from policymakers, investors, academics and people like Zina Poletz, a Minneapolis public-relations executive who says she had little interest in economics before the financial crisis intensified last fall. “I never thought I’d be sitting up late at night reading what [Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke thinks, but now I do,” she says. (..)

“My [economics] professors were always saying, ‘This is the most relevant class you could ever be in,’” says Christa Avampato, a product developer in New York City with an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “But I think until the last 18 months I never really believed them.”

The result is a watershed moment for economics bloggers, ranging from academics to armchair economists, who are all too happy to help readers fill in the blanks—or find a place to vent their frustrations. Traffic to the top sites, such as Marginal Revolution, Freakonomics and the blogs from academics such as Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Brad DeLong, surged anywhere from 80% to 250% from July to September 2008 as the financial crisis intensified, according to Compete.com, a Web site that measures Internet traffic. The most popular blogs can attract as many as 50,000 to 100,000 page views a day. (..)

Selling Books

Blogging, in return, helps academics raise their profile and connects them to a wider audience. “I make no money from my blog, but I do make money selling books,” says Mr. Mankiw, a Harvard University economics professor who served as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers earlier this decade. Mr. Mankiw is also the author of several textbooks on economics. His eponymous blog has received some 10.9 million visits since he started it as an extension of his academic work in March 2006. (..)

The financial crisis has helped crystallize the ideological split between the liberal economists who favor government action and intervention in the economy and the conservatives who prefer a more hands-off approach. The result often pits Mr. Mankiw and other conservatives—such as Arnold Kling, an economist and scholar with the Cato Institute who writes for EconLog, or Megan McArdle, a self-described libertarian who blogs for the Atlantic—against Mr. Krugman or Mr. DeLong in fast-paced, high-profile arguments over health care, budget deficits and stimulus packages. MORE

and its 110 pages .pdf basic document, on how the worst ever crisis of Capitalisms is interpreted from a variety of points of view, only in part related to ideologies: much more to alternative scientific paradigms in Political Economy.

Abandoned Homes by Serrator

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